Topic
Before writing a single word or composing a single online survey question, you need to figure out what you'd like to find out. What's going to be the point, focus or direction of the survey? What exactly do you want to learn from your customers?
Audience
Almost equally as important as determining the focus of the survey is to select who you'd like to ask. The pool of survey-takers may be as small and targeted or as large as you'd like it to be. But, it's important to select the right group of people to send the survey out to because it'll affect your data. And, you must match the focus of the survey to the right group of people.
For example, you're not going to ask first-time shoppers whether your customer service staff solved their problems. That doesn't make any sense!
Length
A survey best practice is to keep whatever survey you're doing short and sweet. It's never a good idea to compose a survey that takes ages to finish. For one thing, you'll dramatically decrease the number of completed surveys, because once people are in the middle of filling out your survey, they'll take on look at how much more they need to do and stop.
A great survey takes minutes to finish.
Distribution
How are you going to get your survey out there? What form will the survey take?
The type of survey determines how you'll distribute it.
Email, fax, SMS, directed landing page, over the phone and in-person are all viable forms of surveys. Pick the one that works the best for your topic and audience.
Other Great Survey Tips
- Know how long you'd like your survey to be active (think: days, weeks and months).
- Assign someone to collect all of the surveys.
- Figure out who is compiling the data collected from the survey.
- If there are any company-wide changes to procedure or policy based on the survey data, ensure that there's an actionable plan to execute the updates.
